Rescue workers found the body of a fourth miner in a flooded coal mine in south Wales, dashing hopes that the last trapped miner would be found alive as a close-knit community was forced to confront the kind of tragedy it thought it had left long in the past.
South Wales Chief Constable Peter Vaughan called the unfortunate outcome of the search-and-rescue operation on Friday “the one that none of us wanted,” because police had held out hope of finding some of the miners alive. It is Britain’s worst fatal mining accident in years.
Officials do not know what caused the accident at the Gleision Colliery near Swansea, in south Wales, an area once synonymous with coal mining, but where the industry all but disappeared since Britain’s labor strife of the 1980s.
Photo: AFP
“This is the end that we all feared but hoped against hope wouldn’t happen,” British Member of Parliament Peter Hain said. “This has been a stab right through the heart of these local communities.”
The four miners have been named as Phillip Hill, 45, Charles Bresnan, 62, David Powell, 50, and Garry Jenkins, 39.
Three other miners managed to get out of the mine after the accident on Thursday morning. One was in the hospital listed as critically ill, while the two others escaped largely unharmed and were aiding in the rescue operation.
British Prime Minister David Cameron called the mining tragedy “a desperately, desperately sad situation,” adding that there would be “sorrow” in the community as it came to terms with its loss.
Rescue teams had been working around the clock, pumping water out of the pit, excavating blockages and shoring up the tunnels. Divers trying to reach the men had been earlier forced to abandon their attempts.
Hain extended his sympathies to the miners’ families — sentiments echoed by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who said he was praying for all involved.
“We thought in south Wales that the days of mining accidents were behind us, but we were wrong,” Wales First Minister Carwyn Jones said, extending his thoughts and sympathies to the family and praising rescue workers.
“All that was humanly possible was done,” he said, adding that people around the world are standing shoulder to shoulder with those affected by the tragedy.
Cameron is being updated regularly on the situation and has been in touch with local police and Hain, a spokeswoman for the prime minister said.
The mine burrowed into a steep and isolated hillside, is one of the few remainders of Britain’s once-mighty mining industry.
South Wales’ mining industry was immortalized in Richard Llewellyn’s novel How Green Was My Valley, whose film version won the 1941 US Academy Award as best picture. Cardiff, Wales’ main port city, once led the world in coal exports.
However, Britain’s Conservative government under former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher shut down most of the country’s mines following a year-long showdown in 1984 with the miners’ union. In the year of the strike, there were 196,000 miners working in Britain; now there are about 6,000.
The worst mining accident in British history was in 1913, when 439 miners were killed in a gas -explosion at the Senghenydd colliery in South Wales. In a 1966 disaster that shocked the world, an avalanche of coal sludge buried a school in the village of Aberfan, killing 116 children and 28 adults.
Seven people have been killed in mining accidents in Britain since 2006, according to British Health and Safety Executive statistics. That is low relative to other countries. In the US, 14 miners have been killed in accidents in the first half of this year alone.
RARE EVENT: While some cultures have a negative view of eclipses, others see them as a chance to show how people can work together, a scientist said Stargazers across a swathe of the world marveled at a dramatic red “Blood Moon” during a rare total lunar eclipse in the early hours of yesterday morning. The celestial spectacle was visible in the Americas and Pacific and Atlantic oceans, as well as in the westernmost parts of Europe and Africa. The phenomenon happens when the sun, Earth and moon line up, causing our planet to cast a giant shadow across its satellite. But as the Earth’s shadow crept across the moon, it did not entirely blot out its white glow — instead the moon glowed a reddish color. This is because the
DEBT BREAK: Friedrich Merz has vowed to do ‘whatever it takes’ to free up more money for defense and infrastructure at a time of growing geopolitical uncertainty Germany’s likely next leader Friedrich Merz was set yesterday to defend his unprecedented plans to massively ramp up defense and infrastructure spending in the Bundestag as lawmakers begin debating the proposals. Merz unveiled the plans last week, vowing his center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU)/Christian Social Union (CSU) bloc and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) — in talks to form a coalition after last month’s elections — would quickly push them through before the end of the current legislature. Fraying Europe-US ties under US President Donald Trump have fueled calls for Germany, long dependent on the US security umbrella, to quickly
Romania’s electoral commission on Saturday excluded a second far-right hopeful, Diana Sosoaca, from May’s presidential election, amid rising tension in the run-up to the May rerun of the poll. Earlier this month, Romania’s Central Electoral Bureau barred Calin Georgescu, an independent who was polling at about 40 percent ahead of the rerun election. Georgescu, a fierce EU and NATO critic, shot to prominence in November last year when he unexpectedly topped a first round of presidential voting. However, Romania’s constitutional court annulled the election after claims of Russian interference and a “massive” social media promotion in his favor. On Saturday, an electoral commission statement
In front of a secluded temple in southwestern China, Duan Ruru skillfully executes a series of chops and strikes, practicing kung fu techniques she has spent a decade mastering. Chinese martial arts have long been considered a male-dominated sphere, but a cohort of Generation Z women like Duan is challenging that assumption and generating publicity for their particular school of kung fu. “Since I was little, I’ve had a love for martial arts... I thought that girls learning martial arts was super swaggy,” Duan, 23, said. The ancient Emei school where she trains in the mountains of China’s Sichuan Province
RSS